The Bottle
by LordMaster6
Summary: Tony finds solace in alcohol as he struggles to come to terms with what he's feeling for Ziva. Set from Summer of Season 5 to TorC. Adult Themes. One Shot


**So originally I was thinking of doing a multi chaptered hurt/comfort fic featuring Tony with a drinking problem, but that didn't pan out. So intead, this is just going to be a little one shot. It starts during the summer after season 5, and finishes after TorC. So, spoilers for some stuff in between all that.**

Anthony DiNozzo liked to drink. He wasn't ashamed of it, drinking was a cultural norm. However, drinking every night, to the point where one would pass out on the closest horizontal surface, be it a bed, a couch or the floor, that was not a cultural norm.

Course, it wasn't his fault. No, Tony's drinking really hit it off on a US aircraft carrier in the middle of a nondescript ocean. He'd lay in his tiny bunk space with a bottle of whatever hard liquor he'd confiscated off the sailors that day and he would drink. Drink until the darkness took him.

Why? Because Jenny was dead, Ziva was gone, and he was on a shitty boat. It was all his fault. He was senior field agent, as he so loved to remind Ziva and McGee, so of course Jenny's death was on him. He was meant to protect her, in his alcoholically imbibed state, it didn't matter if Jenny wanted to die that day to avoid a long and protracted battle with her sickness. She was dead, and he blamed himself for it.

He never forgot to send Abby a postcard, he had to say that he could be pretty amusing when he was wasted. McGee even got the occasional email, when Tony was sober and really bored. Contacting Gibbs felt like a weird exercise in futility, but he did it once, a rambling, drunken apology over Jenny, Gibbs called him back when he was sober and told him that if he ever did that again, he'd get reassigned to Greenland.

It was Ziva he really wanted to talk to. At the funeral, he'd seen Gibbs and his regret. Tony didn't want to wind up the same way. Every time he sat himself down to write Ziva a letter, telling her this, he'd chicken out. Officially, he thought he should tell her face to face. It was his way of not admitting that while he may be seriously smitten, he was still scared.

Then he turned around and she was there, in front of him, in the flesh. He spent four months torturing himself over Jenny's death, but just looking at her face made him forget all that. Tony seriously doubted that Ziva would ever know how much he needed her presence to keep sane.

Only things weren't how they were meant to be. She had another man in her life. That much he could tell during their brief interactions on his ship. She mentioned his lack of a phone call or a letter, if only he'd been able to drag himself away from the bottle long enough to call, then maybe she wouldn't be thinking about another man in his presence.

He could have ignored that fact and told her anyway, but seeing her face hadn't robbed him of his nerves. Tony returned to the bottle with a renewed vigour. This time it wasn't Jenny he wanted to forget, it was Ziva. He was fighting a losing battle there.

Before he knew it, he was back in the bullpen, with his probie McGee, his boss Gibbs and her, sitting across from him. She was right there every time he looked up. But at that same time, she wasn't. Because Ziva had someone else. She didn't spend her nights fantasising about their bodies intertwining, and then seeking solace in a bottle because it wouldn't happen.

The mole hunt, he had sworn he saw a spark there. He listened to her breathing accelerate in time to his in that closet, and the way she'd gone into full ninja mode when he'd been attacked. Then Gibbs was the one using them and he'd vented to her, but nothing came of it. He returned to the one thing he could rely upon to spirit him away from the futility of his feelings for her, the bottle.

She in turn, disappeared. Okay, she was still there, solving cases with the team, he talked to her every day. But she didn't flirt, she didn't look at him the way she used to. She treated him like he was McGee, and it killed him.

Then he learnt why. Why he'd spent a year in an angst driven self pity. Michael Rivkin. What did this guy have that he didn't? Was it as simple that he was there during that summer while he wasn't? Tony couldn't help that, he had an assignment handed to him by NCIS. He was too old to quit and try and find a new career, NCIS was his life. Sure, he could have called, but so could she.

Was there a real connection between Ziva and this Rivkin guy? Or was she just using him like Tony used booze, to forget what could have been, but wasn't.

Gibbs didn't trust Rivkin. Tony was happy to follow his lead. Okay, sure, they disliked Rivkin for totally different reasons, but that was semantics really. Point was, Rivkin wasn't deserving of her. He wasn't faithful to her, he drank almost as much as Tony did, and he ignored Gibbs and his order to leave the country.

"Are you jealous?" She asked him, and for a moment he wanted ask her if she playing dumb, of course he was jealous. What kind of question was that? But then, admitting to jealousy would mean he would have to admit to having feelings that Rule 12 forbade between them. Besides, the time for being honest had long since passed, it was over by the time he'd been reinstated at NCIS after his Agent Afloat assignment.

"No" replied Tony, he caught the hint of surprise in her eyes as he spoke, there came the bitter resignation and he couldn't help thinking that there was no way he could fix this now.

The only thing Tony found redeeming about that night was that he was the sober one. He doubted that he could have taken him if he had been half as drunk as Rivkin was. After Tony shot him and Ziva appeared at the door, he'd watched her desperate attempts to revive her lover. He felt bad for her, as much as he was angry that she went to Rivkin and not him. On some level he understood, he had turned to booze and she had turned to Rivkin. Rivkin was her lifeline, his existence told her that she wasn't destined to spend her days loving something that could never be hers. Without Rivkin, the bare naked truth was revealed.

She was furious at him for it. Ziva needed Rivkin as much as Tony needed the bottle. Tony had robbed her of that. To her, Tony was performing the most exquisite torture, first he had removed the only thing that could relieve her angst. Then his actions sent them back to Israel, to face her father. The man she had been trying to extract herself from the moment she had to shoot Ari in that basement.

Then Tony was back to taunting her, he had her father implying that Rivkin was only there for her on her father's orders. Then they were face to face, and he was repeating the fact that she needed time to get to grips with. "He was playing you, Ziva."

She put a gun to him, and god, how she wanted to pull that trigger. Tony dead would mean the end of the thing that threatened to destroy her facade. But no, the universe decreed that she could never shoot him, or harm him in a serious fashion. It was the paradox that was Tony. His very existence would torture her, but she could not rid herself of it, her very own addiction. So she tried the next best thing, and gave Gibbs an ultimatum. She could not work with Tony, so he had to choose between them. Of course he chose Tony, in his shoes, she'd have chosen Tony too.

She was left in an airfield feeling lost and alone. Unlike Tony, she didn't have time to reach for the bottle to numb the pain and angst. Instead, her father had a mission for her, Rivkin's mission. As the minutes went by and she realised the futility of the mission her father had given her, she decided it was for the best. She would never feel right if she couldn't have Tony, and after Rivkin that could never happen. Death was looking like the preferred option.

Then she was a captive and they were demanding information on NCIS. Why didn't matter, the only thing she knew was that she could never betray the only people who saw her for the human being she was, and not an asset. She prepared to defy her captors, it would take all of her inner strength to protect McGee, Abby, Gibbs and most of all, Tony.

Tony meanwhile, flew back from Israel missing the one thing that could possibly bring him back from that brink. Gibbs would never tell him why she wasn't there, but he already knew. It was all him. He'd been the one who had shot Rivkin, who had forced them into this awful showdown that he had never wanted. At the time his only interest had been preserving his own life, but hindsight suggested that he had deeper, more sinister motives for shooting Rivkin in the chest.

Whatever, she was gone now. The only reason for resisting the bottle, gone. Drinking blurred the days and weeks. Then came the day that threatened to destroy him. Ziva was dead, her ship had gone down in a storm. He played up to the cameras in front of the team, he was stoic, remorseful. But as his apartment door closed behind him that night, the world ceased to hold any attraction. He drank to find oblivion.

The benefits of hindsight. Of all the women in the world, his match had literally been shoved into his lap, basically on a platter. She'd been right there in front of him for five years. She ticked all the right boxes for him, gorgeous, smart, funny, and interesting. At the same time, Ziva was not what he had ever envisaged his perfect woman being. He'd never seen himself ending up with someone who could outlast him physically, someone who could match him for banter and innuendo, someone he borderline feared. But then, maybe that was the secret. He'd dated the normal kind of girl before, they were incapable of keeping his attention for long. He fucked up a sure thing, the day he lost his balls and kept his mouth shut. For all he knew, she might have dumped Rivkin if he'd spoken up. Now he could never know.

Tony swore as that thought came to him. "Now I will never know", she'd said that same thing to him about her love for Rivkin. It made him understand her anger at him at little more, made him feel so much worse. But he liked to think that she shared his feelings

He stopped wearing ties. He just didn't see the point anymore. He didn't see much point in a lot of things. If the team didn't keep inviting him around for dinner, or taking him out for lunch, he'd have stopped seeing the point in that too.

Some mornings he would wake up and not want to get out of bed. It just... felt too hard.

Then McGee and Abby were talking to him. They had found Saleem, the terrorist who Ziva had been hunting when she died. Tony vaguely acknowledged the fact that Ziva had drowned when her ship sunk, but Tony jumped at the chance to have a name to attach blame to. It took his alcohol clouded mind a while to comprehend this. There was a man out there that was physically responsible for snuffing the life out of Ziva. When he thought about it, he and Ziva weren't finished so long as they both lived. But this man, this Saleem guy had ruined that for them.

That was why he'd told Gibbs no. Something he was pretty much programmed to not do. To his surprise, as he had, in conjunction with Abby and McGee, explained how they had found Saleem, Gibbs didn't resist, but agreed to help them track him down. Once again his life had a purpose, to avenge her. If he died in the process, well, that was fine by him.

The plan was stupid and risky. Whilst he had been prepared to die to achieve his goal, McGee didn't deserve to die with him, course, by the time he found himself tied to that chair and McGee unconscious at his feet, it was too late. But then things happened and there she was, breathing, in front of him. He would forever accuse the truth serum of making him say weird stuff, but the truth was "couldn't live without you, I guess."

So yes, he would have been prepared to die with her, rather than live without her. But then Gibbs did his thing and they were back in the bullpen, NCIS was celebrating for them, they still had a hope.

Once upon a time he'd been scared of the thought of a relationship with her, now he feared the thought that she would leave him again.

God only knew what he'd do then.

**Please Review**


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